Encyclopedia of World Biography on William S. Burroughs

An innovative and controversial author of experimental fiction, William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) is best known for Naked Lunch (1959), a bizarre account of his fourteen-year drug addiction and a surrealistic indictment of middle-class American mores.

William S. Burroughs was the grandson of the industrialist who modernized the adding machine and the son of a woman who claimed descent from Civil War General Robert E. Lee. In 1936, he received his bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University. In 1944, after abortive attempts at, among other things, graduate study in anthropology, medical school in Vienna, Austria, and military service, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and began using morphine. The meeting of these three writers is generally regarded as the beginning of the Beat movement; the writers who later became part of this group produced works that attacked moral and artistic conventions. The escalation of Burroughs's drug addiction, his unsuccessful...